Pollution can have serious impacts on lung-cancer patients’ lives

We all have the know-how about air pollution which is very dangerous particularly in causing lung cancer. Those of us, who are faced with such disease, should start a move to the countryside as the population-based study has recently found that air pollution can shorten the survival prospects.

According to the findings of the University of Southern California, the trends could mostly appear at an early stage of the disease specifically at adenocarcinoma, which is a non-small cell lung cancer, the most common type of cancer responsible for almost 80 percent of lung cancer cases.

In this connection, an attempt to estimate the air pollution’s potential impact on individual’s life for survival was conducted by the researcher to track the health outcomes up till the end of 2011. In their research, more than 352,000 people, were newly diagnosed with lung cancer between 1988 and 2009, the details of which are published in US California Cancer Registry.

Notably, the average age at diagnosis recorded 69 and almost 53 percent of the cancers were diagnosed at that stage, which was recorded with a distant spread. At an early stage, the localized disease was 3.6 years but the figure dropped to1.3 years for the regional spread, however, merely 4 months for distant spread.

Though at an early stage of the disease, patients average survival period was notably shortest around 1.5 years particularly for those with small and large cell cancers, yet the longest lasted for those with adenocarcinoma was around 5 years.

By using data from US Environmental Protection Agency air quality stations that mapped the area of residence, calculated that Participants’ average exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3), particulate matter of less than 10 um, and less than 2.5 um, in diameter (PM10 and PM2.5 ).

No firm conclusion via “cause and effect”of the air pollution is taken yet out of this observation-based study. At the end, the researchers pointed to several shortcomings which involve lack of data on potentially essential risk factors like an individual’s lifestyle, alcohol intake, smoking status, and the absence of strong civic sense to avoid road traffic pollution.

However, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has said that there are plausible biological mechanisms for the relevancies found, and ambient air pollution could be classified as a cancer-causing agent.

What they concluded was that the observed associations were clinically significant less than or equal to 38 percent increased the risk of death depending on stage and pollutant, suggesting that reductions in exposure have the potential to improve lung cancer survival.

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